JUSTL participant: Mr Lingyu Zhou
Mr Lingyu Zhou is a Quality Improvement Data Analyst in Dr John Kheir’s laboratory at Boston Children’s Hospital (Boston, MA, USA). He obtained an MPhil in 2015 from the Division of Life Science, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, under the supervision of Professor Andrew L. Miller, where he was involved in developing novel tools to investigate calcium signalling during the formation of the zebrafish heart. After graduating from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Mr Zhou was a Research Intern at the National Key Laboratory at Sichuan University (Chengdu, China) for 12 months, after which he went to Boston University to do a Masters in Bioinformatics degree where he studied computational biology and statistical machine learning. At the same time as working for his Masters, he was a Research Intern, first in the Bioinformatics Hub and then in Professor Gary Benson’s laboratory at Boston University.
Current Work
In his current job as a Quality Improvement Data Analyst, Mr Zhou conducts biostatistics for samples collected from patients, and he also does some software development. He is helping to create an online presence for a patient monitoring system. This position is just temporary, however, and he is currently looking for a more permanent software development position in the bioinformatics field.
JUSTL Programme
Summers at the MBL are academic feasts for all biologists, I was immersed in a broad spectrum of biological frontiers during the two months I was in the US.
Mr Zhou was a participant in the 2015 JUSTL programme. He was mentored by Dr Charlotte Grove and Professor Robert Baker, both of New York University Medical School. During his time at the MBL, Mr Zhou was involved in trying to map the HoxD4a mMLV insertional mutant in zebrafish as well as generating a Hox4Da mutant line of fish using CRISPR/Cas9 technology. He learned a lot of new techniques when trying to achieve these goals and found it to be a challenging summer.
Mr Zhou described his time at the MBL as being “eye-opening and educating” because there were a lot of courses and lectures happening while he was there. He recalls the Friday night lectures, and the open lectures that were part of the MBL Physiology course. One of the lectures that really attracted Mr Zhou’s attention was by Professor Jack Gilbert (now at University of California San Diego, CA, USA) about the microbiome. Indeed, Mr Zhou mentioned that this helped to jump-start his interest in bioinformatics because he saw how computer programming can be such a useful tool for biological research. In another lecture, Professor Eli Eisenberg (Tel Aviv University, Israel), spoke about RNA editing in the octopus and squid, and so when Mr Zhou subsequently took the bioinformatics course at Boston University, he contacted Professor Eisenberg and built a data base for his squid RNA information as part of his final year project. Mr Zhou summarized his JUSTL experience as follows: “Summers at the MBL are academic feasts for all biologists, [..] and I was immersed in a broad spectrum of biological frontiers during the two months I was in the US.”